Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

by Ray Block

Carol Browner, the White House top energy official, and former head of the EPA, said at a function hosted by the Atlantic Monthly, that it’s not going to happen before Copenhagen.

She was referring to the Climate and Energy bills, one passed by the House and the other slowly moving through the Senate.

Carol Browner was speaking to the New York Times  Green Inc blogger, Darren Samuelsohn. “Obviously, we’d like to be through the process. But that’s not going to happen. I think we’d all agree the likelihood that you’d have a bill signed by the president on comprehensive energy by the time we go in December is not likely.”

Carol Browner went on to say: “We will go to Copenhagen and manage with whatever we have.”

The Kerry-Boxer Bill introduced into the Senate as the 801 pageClean Energy Jobs and American Power Act is meeting all the usual political opposition     from the Republican Senators. Senator Lamar Alexander, the Republican Conference Chairman says the bill is a “bungled mess.”

“These are fancy, complicated words for high cost energy that sends jobs overseas looking for cheap energy. Instead, we should take practical steps to produce low cost, clean, carbon free energy and create jobs. ”

“Specifically, we should build 100 new nuclear plants, electrify half our cars and trucks, expand exploration offshore for American natural gas and oil, and double funding for energy research and development.” 

Senator Alexander also said that “all 40 Republican senators have endorsed my plan for building 100 new nuclear plants in the next 20 years.”

Unlike the House Waxman-Markey bill, known as ACTS, the Kerry-Boxer bill approves of nuclear energy as clean energy. But unlike coal, where the bill  mandates that $10 billion is to spent over ten years to support R&D on carbon capture and storage, there is no money allocation to nuclear energy.

The Kerry-Boxer bill is being “marked up”, then voted upon by the Environment and Public Works Committee. It will then move through five other committees-Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Natural Resources, Finance, Foreign Relations before  finally going to the floor for general debate and eventual vote.

All this will take a lot of time, and the bill’s sponsors -Kerry and Boxer openly acknowledge that they haven’t the support of the 60 votes in the 100 member Senate to overcome a filibuster, which would allow opposition  Senators the right to speak at great length.

The political newsletter Politico says (October 1 2009) that the “Democratic Caucus is divided over the legislation, with many rural and manfacturing state senators pushing for a slower approach, and more liberal members advocating for stricter cuts for greenhouse gases.”

On the liberal Democrat side, Senator John D Rockefeller IV of West Virginia said “The climate legislation proposed by Senators Boxer and Kerry is a disappointing step in the wrong direction, and I am against it. This is by no means the defining word on climate legislation in the Senate.”

Back in August, a group of 10 moderate Democratic senators wrote to President Obama that they will not support any domestic climate change bill that did not protect American industries from competition by countries that did not impose similar restraints on greenhouse gases. Senator Rockefeller was one of the 10 involved.

Such a measure to protect American industry would dovetail with the House Waxman-Markey legislation, which would be seen in developing countries as anti-competitive and an attack on their standard of living.

The variety of political positions in the Congress is echoed throughout the business community, with three major electricity and gas utilities-PG&E of California, Exelon of Chicago with utilities in the Mid West and PNM Resources of New Mexico leaving the US Chamber of Commerce, which is fighting tooth and nail against any congressional legislation on climate change and energy.

General Electric and Nike are staying within the umbrella of the Chamber of Commerce, the biggest business lobby in the world, but both have publicly opposed the Chamber’s views on climate change.

In a May 2009 letter to Congress, the Chamber said: “The debate in Congress has left the nation with two terrible options: expensive, complicated, regulation-heavy, domestic-only legislation, or an even worse set of mandatory CO2 controls on everyone and everything through existing Clean Air Act programs.”

The Chamber went on: “Congress should stop, take a breath and consider sensible policy alternatives that increase our energy security, promotes a strong economy and contributes to a global reduction in emissions.”

There are many more weeks of negotiation and horse trading before the final legislation is passed by Congress, but that won’t be until some time next year.

In the meantime, the Copenhagen meetings in December on climate change will drag on into 2010, and even 2011, before a consensus on the post Kyoto world is completed.

 

 

 

 

The NYT blogger quoted  Eileen Claussen, who heads the Pew Center on Global Change pointed to the Senate being a “huge challenge- not impossible, but difficult

Posted under Carbon Abatement Scheme, Climate Change, Economies, Global Warming, Low Carbon Economy, Renewable Energies, World Inflation